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Drake Pushes Rap Toward the Gothic

Drake, the 25-year-old Canadian rapper, was once an outsider but is now at the center of mainstream hip-hop.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

THE new kid is a bit of an oddball. He struggles to be heard and then to find his footing. He is jostled from every side, knocked off balance. He doesn’t give in. He holds his ground until suddenly, despite everyone’s efforts, he’s standing tall. He inches closer and closer to the center, until the center starts moving toward him. Before long he’s the new normal; everyone has to fit in around him.

So it’s gone with Drake, hip-hop’s current center of gravity, his success a reminder of so many of the victories hip-hop has won in the last couple of decades: the right to be decadent, sure, but also the right to reimagine any style of music, the right to be emotionally complicated, the right to be unusual.

In order to fully assess his just-released second album, “Take Care” (Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Republic), it’s important to understand that Drake — the 25-year-old Canadian former child actor who both raps and sings, the self-flagellator nonpareil — is now mainstream hip-hop’s connective tissue. It’s undoubtedly bizarre, this turn of events. In a sea of tough new-money triumphalism Drake is a splash of the gothic. Surrounded by peers who own diamonds but not mirrors, Drake is eager to dismantle himself, to show off his corroded insides. There are a few weirdo hip-hop superstars: the sometime Drake antagonist Kanye West, for sure, and also Lil Wayne, Drake’s label boss. But Drake is turning stranger, and earlier in his career, far more quickly than they did, making it safe for others to follow.

Still, “Take Care” is an astonishingly audacious way of spending his newfound currency. Given that he’s a fixture of hip-hop radio, making an album this outré demonstrates a perverse sense of confidence, and also ignores the received wisdom about consistency and incremental change. It’s stranger than any Jay-Z album, stranger than every album by Mr. West. “Take Care” isn’t a hip-hop album or an R&B album so much as an album of eccentric black pop that takes those genres as starting points, asks what they can do but haven’t been doing, then attempts those things. In the future an album like this will be commonplace; today, it’s radical.

That “Take Care” is an almost complete success is no small feat, especially given that it’s an accomplishment of form more than of content, content having been handled assuredly on the last two Drake releases: his debut album, “Thank Me Later,” and the breakthrough mixtape that preceded it, “So Far Gone.”

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The rapper-singer Drake: onstage at Pennsylvania State University.Credit
Richard Perry/The New York Times

Unexpected choices and juxtapositions abound on this album. There’s mild hypnotic psychedelia on “Under Ground Kings,” space-cloud soul on “Crew Love” and neo-soul on “Cameras,” traditional Southern rap maximalism on “We’ll Be Fine” and traditional New York rap maximalism on “Lord Knows.” The title track is outright dance music, turning both Drake and his guest and ex-girlfriend Rihanna into house divas; that it’s built atop a Jamie xx remix of Gil-Scott Heron from this year separates it from any number of numbing club-R&B hybrids of the day. Stevie Wonder has a piercing harmonica solo that closes out “Doing It Wrong.” And there’s piano everywhere, probably more than on any hip-hop album ever.

Mostly this range reflects the depth of Drake’s partnership with the producer 40 (Noah Shebib), who’s been his compatriot for the full run of his unexpected hip-hop takeover. 40 is a master of atmospherics, dark and damp places for Drake to sweat in. But “Take Care” isn’t nearly the tragic album that its form would suggest. Apart from “Marvins Room”; Drake’s plain-spoken, deeply felt tribute to his mother and uncle, “Look What You’ve Done”; and the bonus track “Hate Sleeping Alone,” Drake doesn’t attempt the depth of feeling of “So Far Gone,” nor does he shoot for the accessible angst of “Thank Me Later.”

There are plenty of flashes of self-doubt, frustration and paranoia, but for an artist who has made agony his paint — like Eminem, you can’t psychoanalyze Drake any more effectively than he does himself — it’s not the dominant tone here.

He confounds expectations. He raps about soft things, sings about hard things. (In this he’s sharing head space with the Weeknd, the Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, who’s spent the last year honing a beautiful new strain of R&B that’s callous, aggrieved and staggeringly vicious, and who is a strong shadow presence on this album.) A fan of mood-sensualists like Sade and Aaliyah, Drake has never sung as intensely as he does on this album. And while he’s a thrilling rapper, on the verge of keeping pace with the genre’s best technicians, he’ll choose feelings over skill almost every time. Even though he shows off several different styles on “Take Care,” it’s rarely just for the purpose of showing off.

He saves most of his flamboyance for the words, which, at their best, are still textbook crisp examples of craftsmanship, full of sly double entendres (“She asked, what have I learned since getting richer?/I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures”) and sly single entendres (“She says, ‘You’re such a dog’/I say, ‘You’re such a bone’ “).

Drake’s Howitzer is still directness, though, daring to state the thing everyone knows but rarely verbalizes: “Girl you ain’t the only one/That’s trying to be the only one,” “The woman that I would try/Is happy with a good guy,” “I need someone to put this weight on.” On “Doing It Wrong,” some of the lyrics and lyrical conceit are borrowed from “The Wrong Thing to Do,” by Don McLean — “Cry if you need to, but I can’t stay to watch you” — but the melody and attitude is all Drake.

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Drake with Rick Ross, left, and Lil Wayne at New Meadowlands Stadium.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

No rapper has been as woman focused as Drake since LL Cool J, but seduction is barely a motif for him. He’s past that, on to disloyalty, miscommunication, manipulation. He lives in a world where complete trust isn’t possible and believes the only woman right for him is a scarred one.

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And then it turns desperate, with Drake switching from rapping to singing, holding notes with a tinge of sadness:

Bitches came over, yeah, we threw a party

I was just calling ’cause they were just leaving

Talk to me please, don’t have much to believe in

I need you right now, are you down to listen to me?

Too many drinks have been given to me

I got some women that’s living off me

Paid for their flights and hotels, I’m ashamed

His confession ends with a muffled “I’m sorry,” recorded as if from a cellphone with poor reception, followed soon by stark and harrowing piano by Chilly Gonzales that sounds like a rebuke.

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Drake with Rihanna, who sings on his new album, at the Grammys in February.Credit
Arnold Turner/WireImage, via Getty Images

And why not Chilly Gonzales, the classically trained Feist collaborator? Drake’s been a longtime admirer. Often “Take Care” is a showcase for Drake’s baubles of taste. He name-drops George Strait and Aventura, remakes Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up” as melancholic lament, and has songs that allude to the Texas hip-hop éminences grises UGK and sample the unjustly obscure Houston rapper E.S.G. He samples SWV, and also Jon B, perhaps the most feather-light soul man this side of Drake; it almost feels like a wink.

Add to those choices Drake’s recent tour with the opening acts Kendrick Lamar and ASAP Rocky, two of the most intriguing and charismatic new rappers to emerge in the past two years, or his willingness to hop on remixes for lesser known artists, like the SBTRKT-Little Dragon collaboration “Wildfire,” or the Atlanta rap anthem “Tony Montana” by Future. Drake isn’t just carving his own odd path but one for others to follow too.

It’s easy to take for granted that Drake is an innovator, an outsider turned insider, because of his ubiquity. Thanks to his versatility, he is the glue that binds together all of urban radio, and even in the down months since his last album, he’s still been a staple — “Fall for Your Type” with Jamie Foxx, “She Will” with Lil Wayne, “Round of Applause” with Waka Flocka Flame.

He also anchored the most important rap song of the summer, “I’m on One,” a collaboration with Rick Ross and Lil Wayne for DJ Khaled’s “We the Best Forever” album, on which Drake brought them onto his playing field of melancholy bombast. You hear that happening too on “The Real Her” on “Take Care,” on which Lil Wayne opens his verse quoting Drake from “Miss Me,” or on “HYFR,” on which Lil Wayne raps what sound like unreleased Drake feelings: “Now she’s texting me, asking for closure.”

The power to convince everyone around you that your worldview is the right one is a rare talent, but Drake’s universe has its own physics, and not everyone can survive there. On this album, besides 40, he’s most simpatico with the Weeknd. Their main collaboration is “Crew Love,” on which the Weeknd coos, the synths soothe like a hug, and Drake talks about giving up on the dream of college life: “Seeing my family have it all/Took the place of that desire for diplomas on the wall.”

Then the song gasps a little, and the martial drums that have been building in the background explode into a full attack as the synths blossom, a shift that’s one of the most exuberant moments in pop this year, driven home by Drake’s conclusion: “Really, I think I like who I’m becoming.” Finally. All it took was winning.

A version of this article appears in print on November 20, 2011, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hip-Hop’s Center Of Gravity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe